The breath we share:
embodied and creative practices for a living and dying world
A collection of essays, poems, scores, performance documentation, theoretical text and experimental thought about eco-embodied creative practices. More than 50 authors from across the globe are contributing to this broad examination of how an eco-embodied practice can melt the distinctions between the felt and the reasoned (which in any case was always a flimsy dichotomy). As I look out of my window (August 2026), I see a landscape that is as death: brown, crisp, lacking the life that usually lustily suffuses the English countryside. These conditions are shared in many places where it is summer now; some are not just crisp and dessicated, but burning, furiously, as if angry with our casual and cavalier treatment of this, our fragile home. Other places are suffering catastrophic winter flooding, with conditions never before witnessed by any living thing. These conditions permeate many of these texts, a living reminder for years to come of the woes suffered by our planet in 2026 and the palpable impact of climate change on our felt and reasoned selves.
This important compendium feels its way into the emergent field of eco-embodied arts practice; the field of course embraces dance and bodywork but reaches far beyond into many other forms of embodied practice. This draft Table of Contents is our first attempt to codify the contents of the book: like all such efforts it will change and bend; the final book will look something like this, to a greater or lesser extent!
Preliminary Table of Contents
est. publication date December 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7397604-4-1
Editors: Richard Povall & Minou Tsambika Polleros
Breath
Pavel Cenkl: Where Breath Becomes Wind: somatic dissolution and the pedagogy of entanglement
Eila Goldhahn: Anima Mundi and Authentic Movement
Christian Pollok: Breathing Commons — Attuning to the Somapolitics of Shared Air
Simon Kenyon & Jennifer Clarke: Breathing Bodies, Turbid Worlds: Toward Eco-Social-Somatic Practice
Anna Reckin: From breath to transpiration
Berit Fischer: To Restore What Sustains Us
Interspecies / more-than-human
Olive Bieringa: I am not an Island: microbiomes and environmentality
Ellen Jeffrey: The hour before the hour before: Navigating body and place through time-specific performance
Marina Turlay: A Basket Made of ‘I’, ‘It’, and ‘You’.
Felix Claßen: Micro-Forest on Air: Listening to Urban Plant Communities
Frederike Doffin: Eco-somatics and Collective Imagination – Broadening Perspectives for Climate Transition Discourse
Liz McGowan: the spirit wraps around me
Marina Guzzo: Mistura #2
Sarah Abbott: Awareness for Interspecies Communication, Collaboration, and Equitable Relations with the Vegetal World
Zhaoxi Zheng: The Sky and Stars We Share: Towards a Sociology of Light and Darkness
Water / Wind / Earth
Isabella Altoé: Becoming Bodies of Water: Ecoembodied Practices and Multipecies Communities in the work of Yo-E Ryou
Lilian Cooper: Tidelines
Rosalind Holgate Smith: Light Touch
Klara Łucznik: Like a Drop of Water: Dancing with Existence as It Is
Carrie Rhys-Davies: In the way of the wind
Rosita Scerbo: Breath as Relation: Eco-Somatic Refusals of Extractive Technologies
Laure Marin de la Valée: Vatarakta: The Wind That Corrupts the Blood
Embodying grief and loss
Polly Hudson: Encountering Rupture: on grieving for a child and a world as it once was
Brittany Laidlaw: Rewilding by Grief: Mythic Embodiment, Ecological Sorrow, and the Path to Restoration
Susan Richardson: Leaf Support
Louisa Chase: The Autistic Body as Gestalt Receiver and Liminal Vessel
Health / Caring
Stephanie Gottlob: Dancing the Biomes: Environmental Ethics and the Creative Moving Body
J Harry Whalley: Still Listening
Anna Casey: Murmuring
Anna Sterckx, Marian Ríos, Claudio Pereira: EcoDANCE – Dancing the Web of Life
Place / Site
Claire Loussouam: Rooting in Hackney Marshes: nine years of learning with a common land
Beatrice Jarvis: Anáil na Móna: Cúram i gComhbhrú | Breath of the Bog: Care in Compression
Troy Allan: Held by Vastness: Embodied Awe and the Night Sky’s Reciprocal Care
Mat Osmond: in conversation with Alyson Hallett
Harriet Fraser & Rob Fraser: still / walking
Sophie Spiral & Shelley Etkin: The Breath of the Garden
Marlene Creates: Between the Earth and the Firmament, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2020
Simon Whitehead & Yusef Samari: Stereo Pilgrims
Katsura Isobe & Ann-Marie Fairbrother: In collaboration with Mugwort
Vanessa Grasse: Branching Dialogues
Embodiment / Being / Disembodiment
Kate Sagovky: Rewilding Play
Fotini Masika: What will you give?
Marina Guzzo: Performative Rest Assembly
Katrina Brown & Emma Cocker: Dorsal Practices
Cherie Sampson: Reciprocal breath – Thirty years in performance with the land
Pete Ward: a sombre tome – making kin with ochre in a modern age
Jamie McHugh: NatureBeingArt
Anna Kushnerova: Silent Forest
Nita Little: An Argument for Embodied Imagination (and why it matters)
Clementine Antier: Entangled Encounters
Interconnection and Transformation
Ann Lenore Moradian: Three Dances
Ben Skinner: From Mushroom Trays to Gravity: Notes on Embodiment and Interconnection
Field Notes / Scores
Minou Polleros: a recorded conversation
Charlotte Du Cann: The Sea Kale Project
Levi Mühlbacher: In flux: nonbinary questionings and ecosomatic practices towards life and death transitions
Raffaele Rufo: Seeding Embodied Ecologies of Knowledge: From Crisis of Perception to Regenerative Participation in Ecosomatic Inquiry
Annette Arlander: Scores
Annalaura Alifuoco: /// front. curve. Tower
Genesis
In 2022 art.earth welcomed more than 180 international practitioners to interrogate somatic practices and how they might foster embodied ecological awareness. Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human embraced multiple fields of thought, practice and research, embodying bridges across the human, plant and animal divide. Learn more at performativities.info
Three years on, the symposium’s core issues feel ever more pertinent and urgent. Despite all we know, the world seems only to double down on a collective environmental apathy, reinforcing the putative supremacy of humankind above other life forms (such an old, old story). Narratives of separation from the more than human world privilege systems based on extraction and exploitation, leaving many paralyzed, indifferent or just stunned into submission.
We know, viscerally, that eco-embodied arts practices can melt the distinctions between the felt and the reasoned (an artificial dichotomy in any case), leading us towards a perpetual and interdependent continuum. It’s now commonly recognised that scientific evidence and intellectual invocations alone fail to move us to act – we need to feel physically and emotionally what is at stake. But we seem to be more estranged from the natural world than ever.
It’s been more than two decades since Louv posited the notion of Nature Deficit Disorder: a codifying of humanity’s growing alienation from the living, breathing world and the felt understanding of a shared planetary materiality and corporeality. What can we do to develop and promote a culture of care, reciprocity and healing in a world that seems to be carelessly drifting towards cruelty, separation and anxiety? More pertinently, how can we nudge felt knowledge and entanglement towards responsible, resilient and sustainable action?
To expand the reach and dissemination of somatically-informed practices and research including artistic processes that speak with and to the more-than-human, seems increasingly imperative in view of the growing schism between the human and natural worlds. This book sets out to reflect on the emergence of new practices and knowledge production, build bridges to other disciplines and thought pathways, define and expand boundaries, and make a real contribution to the sustainability, resilience, vigour and credibility of this field.
How art.earth Books are made
art.earth Books has been publishing since 2017. There are no financial resources to support our publications; we combine our in-house expertise with the generosity of guest writers and editors and partners.
All input is unpaid. As an imprint, we support the cost of book design, the initial print run and handling sales. Proceeds are used to support additional print runs and the seeding of new publications. Marketing is a collaborative effort from everyone who has a stake in the individual publication. Dr Richard Povall is the Executive Editor.
From the initial shortlist we work with those selected to flesh out their ideas into something more substantive – some authors require little support but those with less experience may need help to bring their ideas to the page. We have no proscriptions on length – ideas must have the space they need to flourish and be heard. As a creative practitioner you may feel daunted by words and by linguistic fluency, but do not let that stop you from sending us your proposal.
Our publications are published in English, have ISBN records and are lodged with the UK Book Repositories. Read more about the imprint at artearthbooks.com
What are we looking for?
Whatever you want to send – the only limitation is your imagination. We’re just as happy with poetics as we are with dense academic text (we might be even happier with poetic academic text…). There are no proscriptions on length, language or style and your piece should be as long as it needs to be. Whatever you send needs to fit within our page format which is square although you can include links to things that do not fit within the confines of a page. You get the drift…
Who is involved
Editors: Dr Richard Povall (UK), Minou Tsambika Polleros (Austria/UK)
Editorial Board & Associate Editors (confirmed to date, subject to change)
- Dr. Anette Arlander (Finland) Artist & Scholar
- Dr Berit Fischer (Germany), Curator & Artist
- Mat Osmond (UK) Falmouth University
- Peter Ward (UK) Falmouth University
- Prof Shannon Rose Riley (USA) San Jose State University
- Dr Simon Whitehead (UK) Independent Artist & Scholar
- Sophie Spiral (Germany) Free University, Berlin
- Prof Victoria Hunter (UK) Bath Spa University
- Dr Thomas Kampe (UK) Independent Artist & Scholar
- Anna Kushnerova (UK) Independent Artist & Curator
- Harriet Fraser, (UK) Independent artist (somewhere-nowhere.com)
- Rob Fraser, (UK) Independent artist (somewhere-nowhere.com)
- Dr. Rachel Sweeney (UK) Independent Artist & Scholar
- Dr. Polly Hudson (UK), Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Academic Partner:
Bath Spa University, Creative Practice & Embodied Knowledge Research Group
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Other Partners:
IFEEA (International Forum for Eco-Embodied arts)
BodyCartography (Multi-national)
Have a question?
You can contact us at editor@artearthbooks.com
Project Partners
Project Partners
